Thursday, December 7, 2017

This Old Dragon: Issue #105

I remember the start of 1986 as being a very cold one. Of course this is the month that the Challenger exploded on take off forever changing how we felt about our space program.
I was in the middle of my Junior year in High School. My regular DM was going to graduate and move on so we started a campaign that mimicked WW I mixed with Crisis on Infinite Earths (which was the biggest thing happening in comics at the time). It was so big that depending on where you were in the game world it was called The Shadow Wars, the Dragon Wars or even the Demon Wars. It had a huge impact on my game world and how I later played in college. In fact, this issue gave me some ideas for the group of characters I was playing at the time that were central to the fight. So without further ado, it's January 1986 and this is issue #105 of This Old Dragon!

This cover was also one of my favorites. A flying wizard attacking giant bats? How cool is that! Seriously that is pretty hardcore.

This is issue comes just before the "themed" issues later in the 80s. It has the same look and feel but there is still some evolution happing here.

Letters, as has been a while and will continue to do so, covers clarifications of the new Unearthed Arcana rules. In particular getting the rules to work with other classes that have appeared in Dragon. This is exactly the sort of thing that must have gotten the think tank at TSR to work towards a newer version of the AD&D game. After 12 years things just were not holding together on the fringes as well.

Big ad for the new Dragonlance Legends series. I thought the Legends were a much better set of books than the first trilogy, The Chronicles. The scope was larger, but also more personable.

Speaking of Unearthed Arcana, Len Lakofka is up with his Leomund's Tiny Hut feature in Tone Down the Demi-Humans. Or putting some caps on the power of the new demi-human races. Of the four, Wild Elves, Gray Dwarves, Deep Gnomes, and Drow, I agree with him on the Drow. So much in fact that I banned them as a PC race until only very recently. There was one very notable exception, also see that below. No one ever played a Deep Gnome or a Gray Dwarf in my games for me to have a strong opinion about them.

Paul Vernon is up with Travel Works Both Ways. This is a guide for people (and things) the PCs are likely to meet on the road. Great for any type of hex-crawl or sandbox game. It also fits into the larger philosophy I use in my games that the PCs are not the only ones in the world. They might be the center of attention, but there are others.

Seeing is Believing by Geoffrey Meissner is one of those articles that had immediate and profound effects on my game. Essentially it covers the three types of invisibility you can do in the AD&D game: Light-based, illusion-based, or psychic. Since we were at the time heavy into psionics we used, and abused, the shit of this. If you used the Invisibility spell well then no one could see you, but your thoughts would still give you away to a psychic. If you used the psionic power of invisibility then people didn't "want" to see you, but a mindless creature (undead, construct) could. We got very, very particular about it. I have eased back on it in more recent years, but it's still something I consider.

We get a little bit more on Centaurs in The rest of the Papers. No author given, but a followup to the Centaur Papers.

Ed Greenwood is up with The well-equipped victim: A “treasure type” system for 0-level encounters. Exactly what is sounds like, what 0-level humans/humanoids would have on them. In retrospect, this feels like a "Realms" article. It certainly has the vibe we will later see in the realms where people are more important than monsters (even if some of those people are monsters). Five pages of "stuff" people can carry. Now what I get from this is a good "normal setting" on what we can expect people to have. PCs causally throw around gold pieces, but not everyone can or should do that.

Ah. Now here is something very near and dear to my heart. Especially back then.
Fraser Sherman gives us A world of difference: The parallel concept expands gaming horizons, an article on how to use parallel worlds in your AD&D game. I had already mentioned that DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths was already having a huge impact on my games at the time, but I had also just read Job: A Comedy of Justice and The Number of the Beast by Robert A. Heinlein. I would later pick up Frederik Pohl's The Coming of the Quantum Cats having read the first part in my Pre-calc class when I borrowed a friend's copy of Omni.
Parallel Earth/Universes played a huge, huge part of my gaming then and now. This article did not tell me anything I didn't already know, but it was a springboard AND an excuse to go crazy with the idea. I would later gleefully steal the "D-Hopper" from the Myth Adventures series to make travel between the dimensions easier than travel between the continents of the same world.

Our centerpiece is an AD&D adventure, Betrayed!, for characters 3rd to 5th level by Jim Bengtson.
I will admit I never ran this or even read it in great detail. It looks like it could be fun and got me thinking I really need to run a murder mystery style adventure again.

Merle M. Rasmussen has Spy's Advice or some advice for Top Secret.

One of the first TSR Profiles I remember is up. This time featuring EIC Kim Mohan and Managing Editor Pat Price.

The fiction section is On the Rocks at Slab's which I am sure is related to Well Bottled at Slab's.

The Ares Section is next.

We get some alliances in Rites of Passage for Gamma World.

The Marvel-Phile deals a lot of snake-themed villains. This article had a huge impact on my AD&D game. Not because of the content, but the idea. I created as my central characters for the this world ending war mentioned above a street gang known as the "Spider Society". These were my characters built from Unearthed Arcana. There was the Thief-Acrobat Eric "Spyder" Masters, a fighter (with all the specialization) Kiev Scorpius and drow (this was the exception) assassin "Arachnia". I liked the idea of running a group of first level characters in some adventures of this war along with my high-level characters in other adventures in the war. It was a lot of fun.

Up next are some optional rules for Villains & Vigilantes. Not sure they will port over to the new Mighty Protectors, but there are some good ideas here. Such as lethal attacks (must be the late 80s!) and threatening civilians (yeah, definantly the late 80s).Big Guns covers tanks and other military equipment for Marvel Super Heroes.

Expanding the Frontier gives us ideas on how to (basically) do Star Trek with Star Frontiers. It's actually a good read and one I wish I had made more use of.

Con Calendar, Small Ads, Wormy, Dragonmirth and Snarf.
Dragonmirth has one of the few cartoons I still remember to this day.

Not a watershed issue for me, but certainly a very memorable one and a very useful one.